Thursday, April 26, 2012

RoboCon : Margin of Victory Voter Fraud


























As a follow up to my earlier chart showing Steve's Margin of Victory in ridings with the closest vote margins, I've adjusted it to include only the seven being contested in Federal Court for voter fraud and added two columns of polling data from an EKOS research paper based on a recent phone survey of 4,797 voters. It compares 106 ridings where there were no reports of suspicious activity to the seven ridings where there was a lot - election phone calls made to voters to identify who they intended to vote for followed up by a call falsely telling them their polling station had moved.
Only one of them - Vancouver Island North - had an actual polling station change.

So according to the Ekos poll, if you lived in Winnipeg South Centre, for example, where the Cons took the riding by only 1.8% of the vote, you had a 71% chance of getting a phone call asking you who you were going to vote for. And if you subsequently got a follow-up call regarding polling stations, you had a 30% chance of being told your polling station had changed even though it hadn't.

If however you lived in one of the 106 other ridings used as a control group, you had a 44 % chance of being asked your voting intention and only a 14.7% chance of later being given false polling station info.

From Council of Canadians, who commissioned the EKOS poll and are supporting the court actions :

Other key findings across all seven ridings:
  • 16.9% of eligible voters received calls related to polling stations. Of those, 22.3% were told of polling station location changes (amounting to 3.77% of eligible voters).
  • Of those who were told of polling station changes, the voter intentions were as follows: Liberals 32.6%, Greens 28%, NDP 25.6%, and Conservatives 10%.
  • 42.5% of eligible voters who received calls related to polling stations had a call claiming to be from Elections Canada.
And I can already feel a chilly if friendly wind blowing from the infinitely more rigorous Alice Funke at Pundits' Guide who would never mix up apples and hand grenades like this in the same chart - adding a polling sample onto Elections Canada Official Voting Results.
But if the EKOS poll is accurate, then up to 15% of the vote in those seven closest vote margin ridings -some 50,000 people - received phone calls deliberately intended to suppress the non-Steve vote.


Here's one to a couple in Nipissing-Timiskaming - margin of victory : 18 votes.
During the campaign, Hearst received a voter-identification call from the Conservatives, to which she responded negatively. On election day, after he had voted, Ferance, 66, received a call from a 647 area code — in Toronto — that claimed to be from Elections Canada, telling him that his polling station had moved to a location about 20 kilometres away. 
"I said to him you're obviously a government employee, because that information is totally wrong," said Ferance. "It's wrong because A, I just voted, B, I live next door to the voting station, and C, I can still see people coming and going."
From the sworn affidavit of former RMG employee Annette Desgagne to the Federal Court of Canada :
"17. I also specifically recall that I made Change of Address Calls and talked to people in the riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming about changes of address for their polling stations because I could not pronounce the word "Timiskaming" and had to find out how to say it properly."

Margin of victory riding data from Elections Canada Official Voting Results Table 12.
Last two columns in chart taken from data in EKOS Study

OK-now-you're-just-screwing-with-our-heads update : 
PM's mail room may have shredded historical documents 
Why? Because the mail room was so swamped 3 days after the last election
Oh ---oopsy, a shredding incident.
Did the historical documents come from the Historica-Dominion Institute by any chance?
And Jesus Rose Mary Woods and Joseph, I'll bet even employees at friggin Dairy Queen have to initial registered mail packages they receive.
.

5 comments:

peedeecee said...

Sorry, I don't understand this - what do the headings mean? Phone call re polling station change: 15.5%. Percent of what? All voters? All who didn't vote CPC? Exit poll respondents? And what does "Majority percent" mean?

I grant you I'm not good at graphs, but I find this puzzling.

Anonymous said...

Elections Canada do have a reliable witness to testify, regarding the robo-calls. There were records posted, that plainly show, Harper and his Conservatives were indeed responsible for the election fraud. If one Canadians was cheated out of his/her vote, this is election fraud. The election win, is not valid.

AND, I don't give a damn, who is responsible for this evil fraud. Democracy in Canada is under serious threat. I find this election fraud, deeply offensive.

Watching the House of Commons, we see just how offensive the Harper government really is. It is the Harper Conservatives, who are the only ones, being investigated for the election fraud, and the robo-calls. That is not the only time, the Harper Conservatives have used, dirty tactics/dirty politics.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, Alison, for so brilliantly combining the two sets of data here. Very useful resource. Facebooked.

PDC: Try reading the words under the chart. Maybe start with the Winnipeg example.

Ian

Anonymous said...

Remember that some of the fraud calls weren't worded as a "change" of polling location, but simply announced a wrong address.

Here's an example of one of this class of recording:

http://www.am980.ca/channels/news/local/Story.aspx?ID=1660841

Alison said...

Peedeecee : I think if you click on "Read more>>" under the chart you'll be able to follow it better ;-).
Terms are self-explanatory in the rest of the post. "Majority Percent" is what Elections Canada calls the number of votes the winner wins by, expressed as a percentage of the total votes cast in the riding.

Anon@8:07 : You're quite right of course. "Change" was the term EKOS used in their polling questions so I just went with it.

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